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A teenager who was crazed by high-strength cannabis butchered a grandmother after 'voices in his head' told him to stab a woman.

Ezekiel Maxwell, a paranoid schizophrenic, launched the horrific attack after years of smoking super-strength 'skunk weed'.

The 17-year-old claimed 'gangster voices' from the ultra-violent computer game Grand Theft Auto had set him on a mission to stab a black woman.
He is the second teenage cannabis addict in a month to be found guilty of killing others after smoking the substance. Thomas Palmer, 18, was jailed for life for murdering his two friends with a hunting knife near their homes in Wokingham, Berkshire.

Maxwell prowled the streets with a kitchen knife until he came across Carmelita Tulloch as she walked to her job at a photocopying firm.
He stabbed her seven times, leaving her to die in a pool of blood as he fled home to his family. The case highlights the dangers of the highly potent 'skunk'.
The number of under-18s treated for smoking the drug has doubled to nearly 10,000 in a year and medical experts said the link between it and mental health problems is now impossible to ignore.

Maxwell attacked 51-year-old Mrs Tulloch on September 5 last year after a night smoking skunk and playing Grand Theft Auto.
He believed he was one of the principal characters called Carl Johnson, who carries a knife in the Playstation game, Croydon Crown Court was told.
Judge Warwick McKinnon said it was "a vile and quite senseless killing of an entirely innocent woman".
Simon Denison, prosecuting, told the court: "Maxwell had been planning to stab a woman for seven days, it had to be a black Afro-Caribbean woman. He didn't know why he had done it, he just had to do it."
"He described the voices as taking over his thoughts and his body. They made him do things like cut his hair so he looked more like a gangster.

"Maxwell said in the months before the killing he was playing Grand Theft Auto to the exclusion of anything else.
"He had smoked cannabis the night before, he took a knife from the kitchen and went out to stab someone. After he stabbed Mrs Tulloch he ran home and told his mother what he had done.
"The psychiatric assessment is that he is a great risk to others and will be for many years."
Maxwell lived 500 yards away from Mrs Tulloch on the same housing estate in Kennington, South London. He attacked her within five minutes walk of her home.
The youngster started smoking cannabis and skunk as well as taking cocaine at 14. He had previously been given cautions for possessing cannabis and has two convictions for mugging and assault.
Maxwell said he started hearing voices after smoking the drug and was referred to a psychiatric team by his GP in June last year.

He was prescribed anti-psychotic drugs and his case was reviewed four times. It was due to be considered again the day after he attacked Mrs Tulloch.
Instead, Maxwell went to a police station with his uncle and solicitor and handed himself in. He told officers: "I am given medication for my head and eyes, I don't know why I have been told to take this medication. I have not taken it for two weeks.
"On September 4 I played Grand Theft Auto until late. When I got up I felt a bit unhappy and aggressive. "I went out of the house at about 10am."
"I have a knife with me. I didn't know why I had a knife, I saw a woman, I stabbed her with the knife, I stabbed her three times, there was a lot of blood. After I stabbed the woman I ran home."

Maxwell has since been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Yesterday he was detained indefinitely under the Mental Health Act after pleading guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
Paul Jenkins, chief executive of mental health charity Rethink, said: 'While there can be several triggers for mental illness, we know that if used by people under 18, cannabis doubles the risk of psychosis.
Professor John Henry, a clinical toxicologist, said: "People are beginning to realise that cannabis is not the puff and relax substance that people used to use." Studies show there is an increased instance of schizophrenia in cannabis users, in some people as much as a ten-Marjorie Wallace, Chief Executive of mental health charity SANE, said: "This has all the hallmarks of similar stories where a paranoid schizophrenic has not taken medication but has used cannabis.
"Cannabis, especially skunk, can act as a trigger to psychotic relapse in which someone may lose touch with reality and become a serious risk to himself and others.
"We expect the inquiry into this case will reveal the same faultlines underlying many of the 55 homicides involving mental illness each year."
Mrs Tulloch, a receptionist, was married to Prince, 42, and had two adult daughters, Claudia and Andrea, from a previous marriage and a threeyearold granddaughter called Tianna.
Her sister Carol Smith said: "Someone has to take responsibility, how can he commit a crime like that and no one is responsible?
"There need to be regular check-ups for people like him."

This is certainly very bad publicity for cross-bred cannabis. This was on Richard and Judy (U.K) but I think it made the point clear that this was an exceptional case. Sorry for the double post, by the way, it was an accident and I can't edit posts.

Well I suppose it would hardly be PC to blame the fact that HE WAS FUCKING SCHIZOPHENIC. I think the real moral is don't let schizo kids play grand theft auto, have them stick with tetris or something. Also shows the importance of sites like this that can tell you "hey, if you're schizo doing psychoactive drugs can be a bad thing".

Hearing 'voices in his head' is a symptom of paranoid shizophrenia not of cannabis use. If he had been given better support, this may never have happened. He smoked the night before-- had he smoke that day, he might not have done this violent deed.

All these "cannabis killers" coming out of the wood works, I bet it was those contaminated batches that set 'em off :crazy I dread to think how many psycho "cannabis killers" there'll be in 20 years time when cannabis is another 25 times stronger

Edit: Haha... and aww, I got a dirty lil grey box for this post in my latest rep, apparently someone thought I was being serious with my above statement. I wasn't, maybe some silly icons will better help express it.

While that article was quite laughable and obviously put together from biased misrepresentation of facts; there is a very real connection between chronic marijuana use and schizophrenia admissions. Typically Marijuana exacerbates symptoms in people pre-disposed genetically to certain conditions. Depression, Schizophrenia, Paranoia, etc.. so if someone was going to kill their grandmother then the finger will always be pointed at drugs first; being such an easy scapegoat, as being the actual cause of the harm regardless of other factors.

He hadn't even taken his anti-psychotics for the two weeks preceding the assault + he was known to use cocaine which has been far more conclusively linked with psychosis... but of course it was the drug which has never been causatively linked to schizophrenia that takes the blame? Furthermore we have pretty solid reports on the relationship between school grades and drug use which shows that it is in fact low school grades that are the predicator of drug use, not the other way around (I can't find the report now, I had it up a couple of days ago), so the suggestion is that drug use is symptomatic of social problems rather than social problems being symptomatic of drug use. By this I mean to say that the guy had spent almost all his free time on a computer game suggesting a fairly poor social life which compounds paranoid conditions, and his poor social life coupled with his condition are probably what led him to drugs in the first place. There is a home office report on what factors predicate drug abuse but it is a Literature review and most of the referenced studies are hard to get hold of (The Literature review can be found here). I found a far more specific one only a couple of days ago when I was searching for relations between mental health disorders and drug use but I cant find it now.